Various heat-developable light-sensitive materials are known and, for example, such materials and light-sensitive processes of processing them are described in Bases of Photographic Engineering, Edition of Nonsilver Photography (published by Corona Publishing Co., 1982) , pages 242 to 255 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,500,626.
In addition, a method of forming a color image by coupling reaction of an oxidation product of a developing agent and a coupler is described in, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,761,270 and 4,021,240. A method of forming a positive color image by a light-sensitive silver dye bleaching process is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,235,957.
Recently, a dye transfer method of imagewise releasing or forming a diffusible dye by heat development followed by transferring the diffusible dye to a dye-fixing fixing element has been proposed. In accordance with the method, both a negative color image and a positive color image can be obtained by varying the kind of the dye-donating compound to be used and the kind of the silver halide to be used. The details of the method are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,500,626, 4,483,914, 4,503,137, 4,559,290, JP-A-58-149046, JP-A-60-133449, JP-A-59-218443, JP-A-61-238056, EP-A-220746, Japanese Disclosure Bulletin 87-6199 and EP-A-210660 (the term "JP-A" as used herein means an "unexamined published Japanese patent application").
It has heretofore been difficult to obtain a heat-developable color light-sensitive material which is fogged little when heat-developed and which involves little sensitivity fluctuation relative to the variation of the developing temperature. Examples of using carboxylic acid compounds are described in, for example, JP-A-63-306439 and JP-A-2-251838. However, the light-sensitive materials disclosed in these did not still have satisfactory properties.